


MILLIMETER

by kairiolette



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-03 07:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5281994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kairiolette/pseuds/kairiolette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Closing distance, Haru realizes, is something he worried about a lot less before he knew Rin.” (RHweek2015, day 3: attraction)</p>
            </blockquote>





	MILLIMETER

Haru reaches his locker just as a hand lands on his shoulder and turns him, backs him up against the wall and between the slap of palms against metal. Rin’s face makes up the scope of what he can see.

“What’s your secret?” comes the snarling question, slung at Haru through a toothy grin, and Haru barely dares to draw in a breath lest he steal it right out of Rin.

The gray towel around Rin’s waist comes up just above his pinked kneecaps, held together in a precarious tuck bulging out from his hip. Haru counts goosebumps on his ribs before meeting his predator eyes.

“I don’t have a secret,” Haru replies to the soft point of his jutted-out chin. The tip of Rin’s nose could brush Haru’s if it weren’t for an inch; Haru goes cross-eyed trying to measure the distance. As usual, Rin is doing whatever it is he wants. And as usual, Haru has no idea what he is going on about.

“I’ll get you to crack,” Rin says, tilting his head as if to get at Haru from another angle. Haru grips one of the arms that brackets him until Rin retreats, dropping his hands and leaning back half a step. His eyes catch light as he sizes Haru up.

“Do you sneak off to the gym when I’m not looking? Extra reps behind my back?” he teases, grinning jeeringly in Haru’s face and giving a pat to his chest.

“Probably not.” He laughs at his joke while Haru scowls, watching as Rin steps over the aisle bench to get to the locker across from his own. Rin always gets a second wind after training, the energy spent somehow returning twofold, and Haru feels like it’s always at his own expense. He belatedly swats at where Rin had touched him; it tingles as if a fly had just landed there.

“You’re annoying,” he grumbles, glaring at Rin’s turned back until a water droplet rolls down the length of it, shaken loose from the darkened strands of hair at the nape of his neck. It disappears into the towel around his waist. And then the towel disappears; Rin pulls it off and tosses it across the bench to his side without a backward glance. Haru startles at the range of new skin, traitorous chest thrumming like he had just lifted himself out of water.

Rin sighs with a hum. Haru glares at the dip of the back of his knees.

“You’re annoying,” Rin says back, then laughs under his breath, “I don’t get it.”

The overhead fluorescents cast soft shadows on Rin’s skin—the dimples at the base of his spine, the steeple of his shoulder blades, under the curve of his ass along his thighs. Haru’s fingers curl around the ajar door of his locker and, no, Rin really is the annoying one.

“What’s there to get?” Haru asks, willing another droplet to roll down Rin’s shoulder blade and over his hip, evaporating as it meets his thigh. Rin wobbles on one foot as he steps into his underwear, black with red lining, and then wobbles on the other, a hand braced on a locker in front of him. He drags them up, past shins, shaven calves, knees, strong thighs, over pert fleshier parts. It squeezes around his hips and rides up a little uneven on the left side. Haru tilts his head.

“You’re too damn fast,” Rin replies, and his exasperation gets lost in giddiness, his voice thick with it. Haru’s breath comes giddily, too, like he’s still in the lane with Rin coming up from behind, light-headed and tunnel-visioned. Rin tugs at his briefs with a hooked finger, it happens for Haru in slow motion.

“Maybe it’s your diet,” Haru says. Rin’s stomach, made of taut muscled lines that melt into hips , curves over, his back a bowed arch as he stoops to push his pants over his ankles. It takes too long for Haru to realize that from under damp bangs Rin’s eyes are on him—an eyebrow raised, mouth quirking downward in the faintest playful pout. Heat blooms up Haru’s neck like a rash and betrays just how caught he is; he glares at Rin for making him stare before turning around to his own locker. He has hardly even opened his bag yet.

“I’m not swapping out red meat for mackerel,” Rin replies from behind him, casual as weather. Haru hears him zip his jeans up, then hears more shuffling—he imagines Rin pulling the collar of his shirt over his head. “And that’s definitely not it!”

Haru, taking his dry tee-shirt into his hands, tries to remember how to dress himself. He debates safely slipping his underwear on under his towel, but Rin hadn’t afforded him that modesty. Nudity has never troubled him before. Nor has it ever made his stomach coil, his eyes and imagination wander.

“You’re too heavy and more prone to sink,” he suggests cheekily, rubbing his towel where moisture tends to gather: against the nape of his neck and his lower back, the tops of his arms, his calves and between his thighs.

“That’s not it either,” Rin growls, and with a hurried slam of a metal door he leans over at Haru’s side, shoulder against the wall of lockers beside Haru’s own. Fully dressed, whereas Haru is nowhere near. Haru’s palms go cold; he pretends anyone other than Rin stands beside him, but his skin prickles tellingly, as if there’s a draft seeping through the windows. He pulls his shirt over his head, grateful when the hem of it falls to the tops of his thighs.

“Don’t you put your underwear on first?” Rin berates him, and when Haru turns to frown at him, Rin’s eyes seem to be skirting that hem.

“Does it matter,” Haru mumbles, then finally does grab his underwear out from his bag, stepping into them and trying not to tip over with the potency of Rin’s electric attention.

“No dry pair of jammers this time?” Haru doesn’t grant him a response, knows Rin can see just fine. Rin scoffs. “Maybe I should try  _that_ out…”

“You have to try feeling the water properly,” Haru says, to distract Rin and to distract himself from the tension tugging his shoulders up. But Rin doesn’t take the bait right away like he usually does; he rests his head against the lockers, weightily watching Haru while he dresses.

“Enough with that philosophical stuff,” he finally grumbles. He leans in closer, ever approaching infinity, never crossing the line. “I just want to know what makes up the millimeter that always seems to be between you and me.”

Haru blindly steps into his sweatpants, daring Rin to glance away first. Closing distance, Haru realizes, is something he worried about a lot less before he knew Rin.

“There is something that keeps me ahead,” Haru says, turning back to his locker, pulling his shoes out of his bag. Rin makes a curious noise from right beside him. Haru tugs on his socks, slipping his feet into his shoes, measured movements to counteract immeasurable words. “Something I have that you could never.”

Rin scans Haru’s face, from his chin to his temple to his cheek to his mouth to his eyes again. Haru feels it like the drag of a fingertip.

“Name it,” he urges, breathless, low enough for the buzz of the overhead lights to almost drown it out, and Haru swears it puffs out against his chin. The corners of Haru’s lips twitch—an upper hand. What could it be, Rin? he taunts. Who? Rin holds his breath like he knows.

Haru raises his hand to cup his mouth. Rin startles before catching on, leaning his ear in toward Haru with a frown that seems to squirm on his face. His shampoo is dizzying. Haru draws in a deep breath to memorize it.

“No,” says Haru against his ear, not bothering to whisper it. Rin jolts back from him, eyes wide. Haru narrows his own into a glower, thinking,  _that’s for peeking_. With a sudden thrilled bark of laughter Rin grips Haru’s wrist, wrestles it back like he wants to pin it to the lockers, and Haru can just hear him say it, an inch from his mouth,  _you started it_.

Haru moves quick to sit on the bench before gravity tugs at his knees, deciding to tie his shoes up before can Rin reel him back into his own orbit. Rin splutters for a moment above him.

“Well, what were you going to say?” he asks wildly, eyes a flash of anger. He flattens the hair on the back of his head, his face hot.

“Nothing,” Haru replies, moving to tie his other shoe. Rin plops down beside him on the bench.

“Tell me,” he whines, laughing like he’s twelve, and Haru will not give him the satisfaction—after all, Rin is the one who says whatever he likes. Rin leans into Haru heavily, elbowing his side a couple of times.

“Classified information,” Haru replies resolutely, and meets Rin’s corner-of-the-eye glance— _not nothing, then,_  Rin’s raised eyebrows seem to say. He maps out Haru’s face again for a second, then huffs, withdrawing.

“Well,” he sighs, standing up and running his hand back through his hair. Haru, hiding a smile, wonders what he’s thinking. “It’s been hours. I’m starving.”

Haru pulls his hoodie on, watching Rin’s back as he meanders toward the exit of the empty locker room.

“Dinner..?” Haru wonders, his stomach responding to the word like a beckoned dog. The swimming never depletes him half as much as Rin always manages to.

“And drinks!” Rin exclaims, looking down at him with a devilish grin. “We’ll see how much you spill after I get a couple in you!”

“It’s late,” Haru protests in an instant, heaving his bag over his shoulder and shutting his locker once and for all.

“Because you took your time changing,” Rin argues, and as Haru catches up with him to walk together, Rin gives him an innocent nudge. “Why? Something caught your eye, back there?”

“Shut up,” Haru nearly chokes, looking ahead, ignoring Rin’s laugh and ignoring Rin’s arm thrown around his shoulder.


End file.
